The issue that this article is ignoring is that America, being 10X bigger audience-wise, tends to have productions with 10X bigger budgets, which translates into astronomically more revenue generating potential. How is Canada expected to compete in this environment?

It's sort of like how Canada has way more softwood lumber than America does, so we can sell a higher quality product to America at a much lower cost. America responds to the situation by violating the Free-Trade agreement and their own court decisions, and taxes the Canadian wood anyway, because they can't compete with what we offer.

Made in Canada content taxes are the same thing, only these taxes don't violate any pre-existing agreements between our countries.

The writing and acting quality may be nearly equivalent, but the level of production quality is no where near the level of polish American content can achieve. So we take a few bucks from the big players to help the little guys get their project finished. I don't see anything wrong with that idea for big, professional, commercial productions.

However, per capita, Canadians are among the most prolific content generators and consumers on YouTube. We are punching well above our weight class in the area of user generated content, and all this is happening organically without any tax incentives, and this fact needs to be taken into consideration. The CRTC tries to sweep user generated content aside because to be "really Canadian" content needs to be scripted and available in both official languages.

Well, as a producer of user-generated content, I'm not going to dryly read from a script, and double my effort and expenses to produce everything in a second language to appeal to an insignificantly small audience; I'm going to use my mother tongue, and keep it off-the-cuff and organic.

Why do so many other countries appear to have more intelligent leaders/courts than the good old USA?

For a multitude of reasons.

Globally, the parliamentary democracy system has been shown to form far more stable governments than American-style republics.

In Canada, when a corporation gives a large sum of money to a politician in exchange for passing certain laws, it is considered "bribery", rather than "lobbying".

Having 3 major parties (Liberals, Conservatives, and New Democrats) that span the political spectrum instead of just one party (Republicrats) also helps.

In the rest of the developed world, religion isn't nearly as big of a problem as it is in the United States. We prefer to evaluate reasons and examine evidence rather than blindly having faith that things will 'just work'.

Our education system focuses on education, rather than teaching students to pass tests.

And most of all, because our countries are utterly insignificant compared to the United States, we have to pay very close attention to what you guys are doing. When we see America failing so spectacularly, it provides us with a very clear example of what not to do, and it is discussed immensely, and public concerns can become national issues. How much attention does the United States pay to some tiny place that no one has every heard of when things go wrong there?

"Musicians, filmmakers, photographers....writers....should be able to make a living from their work."

I get about one email every day from some multimillion dollar company asking me to work for free to provide them with some content that "isn't in their budget for this project, but will lead to great exposure for me"

Then when I point out that if they assume that working for free is ok, then the project director should transfer their paycheque over to me for the duration of the project, and they can work for the exposure, they make it sound like I'm the one being unreasonable.

I don't care one bit if regular people infringe on my content; I'm all angried out by these big companies who are screwing the artists *and* screwing their fans.

I have a fair number of good friends with PhDs, and I am acquainted with many other PhD havers.

None of them ever point out the fact they have PhDs, it only comes up casually in conversation years later.

"Hey can you help me with this coding problem I'm having? Oh, wow, you are really good at math! Oh, you have a PhD in the subject? So I should have been calling you "Doctor" this whole time? Hahahah! Another round?"

The only person I've ever met to incessantly point out that they had a PhD was the worst, most useless prof I ever had the misfortune of studying under.

Generally, people who are really good at something don't have to point out their qualifications, as their work speaks for itself.

If the authorities think "wget" is some sort of elite hacker tool, just wait until they find out about "dd".

*Facepalm*

Freaking out over wget is almost as laughable as hearing something like "using "Ctrl+C" and "Ctrl+V", a group of elite hackers were able to steal the contents of several websites and recreate various articles on their own computers at home."

"Or let me put it into perspective for a drug using, liberal, hippy pussy like yourself: 99% of people who smoke pot do it responsibly and safely, but 1% of the people who use participate in violent crime, or crash their cars when theyre high and kill others or themselves, but I don't see you posting about how ALL pot smokers should be punished."

Well, that's because one is burning a leaf, while the other is a tool specifically designed for killing things. And if you're driving high and crashing and killing people, it's the motor vehicle, not the weed that is doing the killing. That's why vehicles have a long list of strict safety targets they must meet to be street-legal.

*facepalm*

Americans and their guns...if only they realized how silly their obsession looked to the civilized world...

"i see nothing wrong with his site. if you are foolish enough to give nudes to someone you should make sure they are mature enough to pull something like this if the relationship goes wrong."

Well, without a signed model release, publication of images where the model is the clear focus of the image, and not an incidental background figure is exactly the kind of thing that can get you into some legal trouble. That's why photographer's assistants and Production Assistants are so insistent that everyone appearing on-camera signs the model release.

I've been working to get on 'the Da Vinci sleep schedule' for the past few years. a 20-30 minute nap every 4 hours. Eventually, your body gets so exhausted you jump straight to REM sleep - or so the theory goes.

I find that irritability, diminished motor skills, poor decision making, vision problems, inability to concentrate and poor memory are the real outcomes of this bizarre schedule.

As a Canadian, a person from the land of strict gun control, I don't know if my perspective is quite the same as everyone elses here, but rather than trying to ban something outright which is completely unenforcable, why not just do something like automatically double the sentence for any crime committed by a person in posession of a gun, 3D printed or otherwise, whether or not the gun was used, to disincentivise people from using guns for evil, while not restricting the rights of those who aren't huring anybody?

You can't stop a guy with a lathe and a milling machine from making a gun, and that's been around for decades, what's so different about 3D printers? Nothing.

Rather than freak out and try to do the impossible, why not legislate what you can control?

"What does that mean in real terms? It means if your machine dies or you upgrade to a new computer you cannot take a copy of Office 2013 with you to new hardware. You will need to purchase another copy, which again will be tied to the machine it is installed upon forever."

This is completely wrong. What this means IN REAL TERMS, is that users will download a cracked version of office from the pirate bay when their legit version fails to function on a new machine.

I really wish the film and music industries would offer a simple service where I could just go to their website, pick a piece of content, and pay $5 to support those involved in the creation of that content, then I'd get an email saying I was now licensed to own a copy of that content in any form.

Then I can go to pirate bay, iso hunt, or wherever, download the content, and it would be perfectly legal and paid for, and that would be the end of it.